Colleges in the Indian state of Uttar Pradesh said Wednesday that female students would be banned from wearing jeans and other Western clothes to halt sexual harassment by male classmates.

“Girls who choose to wear jeans will be expelled from the college,” Meeta Jamal, principal of the Dayanand girls’ college in Kanpur city told AFP. “This is the only way to stop crime against women.”

A growing number of colleges in Uttar Pradesh have decided to outlaw jeans, shorts, tight blouses and miniskirts on campus in an attempt to crack down on “Eve-teasing” — as sexual harassment is known in India.

At Saudi Arabia’s only beauty pageant, the judges don’t care about a perfect figure or face. What they’re looking for in the quest for “Miss Beautiful Morals” is the contestant who shows the most devotion and respect for her parents.

*aka, “least likely to be honor killed.”

“The idea of the pageant is to measure the contestants’ commitment to Islamic morals… It’s an alternative to the calls for decadence in the other beauty contests that only take into account a woman’s body and looks,” said pageant founder Khadra al-Mubarak.

“The winner won’t necessarily be pretty,” she added. “We care about the beauty of the soul and the morals.”

There are few beauty pageants in the largelyconservative Arab world. The most dazzling is in Lebanon, the region’s most liberal country, where contestants appear on TV in one-piece swimsuits and glamorous evening gowns and answer questions that test their confidence and general knowledge.

See! Conservatism is like totally obsolete!

There are no such displays in ultra-strict Saudi Arabia, where until Miss Beautiful Morals was inaugurated last year, the only pageants were for goats, sheep, camels and other animals, aimed at encouraging livestock breeding.

Back here in America, Sukaina al-Zayer’s conservative Christian counterpart is being slandered for opposing same-sex marriage and not having the courage of her convictions to at least wear a burqa/Darth Vader mask. The hypocrite even got breast implants!

Social networking sites like Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter have exploded on the scene in the Western world over the past several years and enhanced our lives by exponentially increasing connectivity and resourcefulness. Similarly, mobile phones have evolved into hand-sized computers which can be used to instantaneously transmit messages of all types.

Simply put, we’re so immersed in the Information Age, we take it completely for granted.

So, when I heard that Facebook was growing in popularity in the Muslim world and that they were using text messaging for something other than detonating explosives, I had to admit I was filled with hope.

Maybe we’re not that different after all.

Here are some interesting ways the East and West are integrating these new technologies into their worlds.